MusicBrainz Server virtual machine

Running an NGS virtual machine requires some Linux knowledge, but it is vastly simpler than installing NGS from scratch. The pre-built virtual image can be imported into either VirtualBox or VMware. If you are using Amazon EC2 you can not use this virtual image and will instead have to follow the steps outlined in the source code INSTALL.md. To use the virtual machine instance, follow these steps:

Automating Replication

We recommend leaving replication off for the time being, until you've built search indexes for the VM.

Building search indexes

The VM comes with support to build search indexes. In order to build the indexes, log in to the account and then:

bin/reindex

Depending on your machine, this may take quite a long time. We recommend that you leave this running overnight. After the indexes are complete, you should be able to carry out indexed searches in your VM.

Turning the VM into development box

If you would like to use the VM to do development instead of using it as a simple database slave, you'll need to edit lib/DBDefs.pm and set REPLICATION_TYPE to RT_STANDALONE and run admin/psql READWRITE and execute the following queries:

DELETE FROM annotation WHERE editor > (SELECT max(id) FROM editor);
DELETE FROM release_annotation WHERE NOT EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM annotation WHERE annotation.id = release_annotation.annotation);

Support

The setup process may look daunting, but please don't let this discourage you; the INSTALL is thorough and contains a lot of information, and we are willing to provide assistance. If you have questions about installing, join us in the #musicbrainz-devel IRC channel or post a question on the developers mailing list and we will attempt to help you out.

We recommend that you dive in and give it a try - who knows how far you'll get and what you might learn along the way!

Requirements

In order to set up a running MusicBrainz server with the full database you will need:

A linux box, preferably Ubuntu.

8GB of free disk space, (if you are a developer and only want the server code and database structure 2GB is more than enough).